RSA: iPhone worm marks "early days of mobile malware"

iPhones need to be treated like Blackberries.

The iPhone worm that emerged over the weekend is indicative of a new wave of mobile malware and businesses have been advised to update their security policy.

Following the Apple iPhone worm detection, Sam Curry, vice president of product management and strategy at RSA, claimed that this marks the "early days of mobile malware".

While Curry said that the previous attempts such as the Ikee worm were a mere proof-of-concept, the new discovery is more malicious as it goes after something of value. Despite this, Curry said that this is still not the year of mobile malware.

Curry said: “As the value of a platform rises, the attention paid by hackers to that platform will rise too and over time, with attention, the cost to break it will drop. For now, this behaviour and the real threat is stochastic in nature. As it builds, it will achieve critical mass and become a sustained phenomenon that we can measure and even make reasonable trend projections regarding.”

Curry went on to say that while this is not the year of mobile malware, it may be ‘the year of mobile malware news', and said: “It is meaningful because I still hear people ask if there is inherently better security in one platform over another. These people need to know that there is no security in obscurity. There is no platform that is inherently superior to another, although some platforms handle security as a process better than others.”

He concluded by advising enterprises to start treating iPhones as they do BlackBerries. “It's time to blow the dust off the mobile appendix to the security policy and make it fresh along with all the other New Year's resolutions,” said Curry.

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